Thresholder

After half a day of having a radio link, one thing was clear: Jeff really, really liked to talk.

“So, here’s the thing,” said Jeff. “I lied about killing everyone. It was a heat of the moment thing. I’m not going to do it. First off, it seems like a lot of work, and second, it seems really boring. There’s probably something to fighting against the mechs, maybe that could be fun, but it’s so impersonal, you know? It’s like killing someone with poison. What’s the point unless there’s a clever twist to it? Where’s the drama, the pathos? It’s a coward’s weapon. I guess poison has been on my mind a lot lately, for obvious reasons.”

“It wasn’t poison,” said Marchand in Perry’s voice. “I keep telling you that, and you keep not listening.” Perry had quickly tired of what seemed like endless talking,

“You say that it’s not poison, then you call it radiation poisoning,” said Jeff. “Explain that to me.”

“It’s what it was called on my world,” said Marchand. “They probably just got it wrong.”

“It’s a very womanly way of killing, poisons and diseases,” said Jeff. “Men are supposed to go in with their swords drawn, and it’s women who do the cooking, who do the poisoning too.”

“That’s not how it is in every world,” said Marchand. “You know I studied these things, right?”

“Poisons?” asked Jeff.

“No, sociology, people, their cultures, how those cultures are shaped by material conditions, that kind of thing. If you can see my past right now, you could dip into some of those memories, sit in on some classes, and educate yourself.” The voice was very close to Perry’s own, though he thought it was a little more flat in the affect, and sometimes the word choices weren’t what he thought they should be. Still, it was better than having long talks with Jeff himself. The recordings were sped up, and Marchand only played the relevant bits.

“Nah,” said Jeff. There was a rasp to his voice. “Not if your academies are saying that poisons aren’t for women. They definitely are. I’ve seen a lot of worlds, met a lot of killers. I was in prison, surely you listened to the pillow talk? Women don’t need it to be up close and personal like men do.”

“I don’t really feel like this needs a debate,” said Marchand. “Radiation poisoning means damage to your DNA. Your healing probably keys off DNA rather than anything else. You’re not healing back, or you’re healing back with tumors, or whatever the hell else has gone wrong with you since we saw each other last. But if you want healing, then we should fight. I’ll spare you when I win, I swear on my mother’s life.” Perry didn’t particularly like that, but it wasn’t like swearing on his mother’s life actually meant anything, especially not when Marchand was doing the swearing on his behalf.

“There’s a better chance than the portal,” said Jeff. “It took me some time to find it, but all I need is to eat one of your teeth. So, let’s talk about that. Naturally I’m disinclined to go anywhere that you tell me to go, given the bombing. I’m bomb shy. What we’re going to do instead is, I’ll have you bring the tooth to me, somewhere that I know you can’t deliver a bomb.”

“I can’t give you the tooth,” said Marchand. “It’ll turn you into a monster.”

“More of a monster, you mean?” asked Jeff with a laugh. “Look, you tell me how you’re going to get that tooth to me. Can’t trust you though, honestly, and the more I look at your past, the more I think that you might try to blow me up even if there’s some people around.” He sighed. “You’re a real bastard. I respect it.”

“Blowing people up would be a war crime,” said Marchand. “I don’t do those.”

“So we’re at an impasse before we’ve even started,” said Jeff, ignoring that. “I want that tooth, and you want to go on to the next world as badly as I do. I looked at you leaving Brigitta a few times, saw on your face the relief when the message came in. Tracking incoming threshies, that’s something I’ll have to figure out, I guess. You lit up with an energy you hadn’t had in months. This world is shit, we both know it.” He let out a long breath, which sounded wet. There was something about his voice that made it seem like he was laying down. “So I’ve thought about it, and here’s what I want — I want you to fly up into space. I figure I’ll be able to see you from a few miles away, and we can have a big old fight up there, and if I see anything that looks like a bomb on you, or coming my way, I’m not going to fight you, I’m going to fly off and we’ll never see each other again. See, I’m going to pull through this radiation thing, it’s just terrible and I hate it, but I’m also pretty confident that I have more willpower than you do. So what I’m going to do, if you try your dirty tricks again, is fly away from this planet and just outlive you. Isn’t that hilarious? And you might think that even if I could survive, which I can, I would be bored out of my mind, but no, I have your past to look into Perry, and I can watch every movie you ever watched, sit through all those college classes, your entire past. But oh, I’ll be out there, waiting to see whether there’s any ships leaving the planet, and if they do, I’ll smash the shit out of them. Or, if I get bored, I might come down and do some random acts of violence. I guess I don’t know for sure.”

“So that’s the offer?” asked Marchand. “A fight in space or I can just have you fuck off forever while I live a good life down here?”

“No, no, I haven’t forgotten about the tooth,” said Jeff. “You’ll send that along to me, from ten miles out, in some kind of container. I’ll see it, I’ll catch it, and I’ll eat it. Then we fight, like we both want to.”

“Give me some time to think about it,” said Marchand. “But space is big, it would be difficult to find each other without you having a signal.”

“Eh, signals, I don’t trust them,” said Jeff. “You’re probably finding my signal now, pinpointing where I am. We’ll meet near the space station. I’ll be somewhere in the area. I’ll give you a day to make your preparations, but not more than that. I don’t want you having more weapons.”

That wasn’t the whole conversation, not even close, but it was the end of what Marchand felt was relevant for Perry to hear.

“I think I could handle a fight in space,” said Perry. “It beats having a fight here on the ground, near people, so long as it’s not a ploy. You did a good job of being me.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Marchand. “I like to see myself as a student of you and your ways.”

“I’m also impressed that you had an understanding of magic,” said Perry.

“Ah, in that case I was saying only what I thought you would say, sir,” said Marchand.

“Close enough,” said Perry. He thought for a moment. “Go to hidden channels.”

Perry began typing on the imaginary keyboard. In theory, Jeff might be able to look carefully at the position of Perry’s fingers as he ‘typed’ and then painstakingly write down every keystroke, but Perry was also typing in different languages, trusting Marchand to smoothly translate between them. Marchand, in turn, had been instructed to encipher his messages in a constructed language that the second sphere translation could still handle, which had taken some work but was as good as they had managed on short notice.

The end result was many layers involved in carrying on the same conversation.

“We could make a fake tooth out of polonium,” Perry typed. He still knew next to nothing about radiation poisoning, and only said polonium because of a thing with some tea he’d read about once. “Or we could set up some weapon that he wouldn’t be able to dodge, some kind of deadly laser that we could fire from ten miles out and kill him with.”

“I’ll run some simulations, sir,” said Marchand. “But I don’t suspect that either of those options are workable. Poisoning him with more radiation would work, naturally, as would sending the second device to cause a criticality excursion, but we must assume that he’s prepared for those eventualities. If he can see us from ten miles away, he might simply ask you to extract the tooth he wants while he watches. You could not have the fake tooth stored away in your own mouth without significant risk to yourself.”

“The laser then?” Perry typed.

“His speed presents problems, sir,” said Marchand. “A railgun or something similar might be able to hit him, but his technology allows for recovery from a blow of immense magnitude.”

“It’s not tech,” typed Perry. “And we captured that from him, so in theory, he won’t be able to heal up. I think I’ve seen all his tricks. You don’t think the laser gun would work?”

“The laser’s power depends on sustained targeting,” said Marchand. “His speed makes it a non-starter at those distances, given we can’t bring up enough power. The full output of the microfusion reactor would be enough to kill a normal man, perhaps even at those distances if atmospheric scattering weren’t an issue, but against this target, with the nanoarmor he has, I’m skeptical.” Jeff didn’t have nanoarmor, but this was how Marchand had chosen to conceptualize the apparent density of Jeff’s flesh.

“Worth trying,” typed Perry. “He wants the tooth, I don’t think he’ll run if we have a weapon with us. I mean, we are a weapon. But I really want to avoid a tussle in space given how much faster and more maneuverable he is. He doesn’t seem to know I have the ring, but a quick search of my recent past will give that away. Fuck.” He’d had a brief thought of hiding some major weapon in the shelfspace, but that would get given away quickly enough. “I guess we might have to go for it.”

“Yes, sir, it does seem that way,” said Marchand.

Perry mulled that over as he made his way through the Natrix. It felt odd to be back, given the circumstances, and the reactions to him weren’t as pleasant as he might have hoped. Jeff’s presence had cast a pall over the community, and then that had been amplified by the team that Jeff had murdered. There had been more deaths than the Natrix had suffered in years, family and friends. It had been one thing to have Perry descend from the heavens with all kinds of powers and solutions to their problems, but the warnings of another thresholder coming had been easy to brush off as something distant. Now it was here, and at least some of the blame had landed squarely on Perry’s shoulders.

He hadn’t been able to protect them.

“So,” said Mette as Perry arrived on the upper level. Mette was pacing out in the hallway. “She’s safe, so long as you think she won’t kill herself by jumping out the balcony. I offered her food, but she wanted to know what was in it, and I said that some of it was sourced from the bugs. She seemed disgusted, which … I understand, if I take a step back and think about it objectively. It’s how I felt when you told me about drinking cow milk. She’s had some food, plant stuff, but she keeps standing out on the balcony, and it’s been making me nervous.”

“I don’t think it should,” said Perry. “She was willing to cut her own leg off to escape. There’s some despair there, but she’s angry, a fighter, not suicidal. I think I have a good read on her.” There had been all kinds of wounds around her manacle, and everything around her had been cleared, which said to Perry that there had been escape attempts. “Can I talk to her?”

“Why are you asking me? You’re the one who brought her here,” said Mette. “Is she supposed to just … be ours now?”

“Possibly,” said Perry. “Look, I have something that I need to share with you — I have a way to bring you to the next world, if you want.”

Mette stared at him. “Since when?”

“Since I inadvertently stole something from Jeff,” said Perry. “I had thought you’d known, because I told Brigitta, but apparently she didn’t share it, so … I don’t know. Come with me?” He waved his hand and the shelfspace appeared behind him.

“Magic,” she said, shaking her head.

“Magic,” nodded Perry.

They stepped through together, and Mette looked around. “All this stuff.”

“Most of it is useless to me, unfortunately,” said Perry. “There are lots of weapons, but most of them don’t pass the scratch test, and Marchand thinks that if used in combat, they would break, at least if I go as hard as I like to. That happened all the time in Seraphinus until I got my sword. But I just want you to look around, get some measurements, see what it would take to make this place into somewhere that can be habitable in the long term for a small population.”

“I can see why Brigitta wouldn’t tell me,” said Mette, looking at the floor and then the ceiling.

“Why’s that?” asked Perry.

“She would know I would be first in line to go,” said Mette.

“Start thinking through the engineering stuff, then start the engineering,” said Perry. “I have a date in orbit for another fight with Jeff. You have a day.”

“A day?” asked Mette. “I’m not even an engineer. And to abandon my post on the Natrix, to leave my children behind … I’m intrigued, and my initial answer is yes, but I can’t just do it without thought or reflection.”

“A day is as much as I can offer you,” said Perry. “And I’m going to be fighting in space, so if I lose … well, it won’t be great. Best case, I lose, Jeff grabs the ring, and you’re on another world with a psychopath in a prison. Worst case, you die of starvation or thirst.”

“You’re really selling this, huh?” asked Mette. She was peeking around the shelves. “Alright, let me out, I have about a thousand things I need to do. I should have let someone else deal with Helge, but she knew me, and it didn’t seem right to hand her off. If I’m going with you, if you want me to live in there, I have people I need to talk to, maybe Frans — shit.” Her face fell.

“What?” asked Perry.

“Frans was part of the gathering crew,” said Mette. “The one that Jeff murdered.”

“Oh,” said Perry. He opened up the real world to them, and stepped out after Mette. “Sorry.”

“Just kill the fucker,” said Mette. “I’ll get everything ready for me to camp out in there, but I can’t guarantee how many people would be willing to bet on you. No chance you could win, land, and then we get in?”

“It’s possible,” said Perry. “I don’t want to risk missing the portal though.” He looked at the door to the penthouse Mette had been standing outside of. It was his penthouse, the place he’d lived for a substantial fraction of his adult life. He had figured they would repurpose it, but it still felt awkward. “I’m going to talk to her, do you think that’s a good idea?”

“You know her situation better than anyone,” said Mette. “Do your best.”

She left to go do her own work. Perry hoped that she would come with him. It would be just too depressing if he found a way to take someone with him to another world and no one wanted to come with him.

Perry knocked on the door, and when there was no response, he slowly opened the door.

Helge was standing on the balcony, hands on the railing. The manacle had been removed, and her leg was wrapped with gauze, presumably after the wounds had been treated as best they could be. She was out of the shift and into a long-sleeved shirt with shorts that came down to just below her knee, though she was still barefoot. Her hair hung down limply, still half-damp from a shower.

“It’s always twilight here,” she said, not turning to Perry. He had tried to make some noise as he entered, so as not to startle her.

“No,” said Perry. “There’s only life in the twilight, but that lasts for maybe two hundred days.” He could feel the translation take hold, his intent curling the words into a different shape that she would understand.

“And then fire?” asked Helge.

“Yes,” said Perry. “Fire, which scours life from this place, for something like sixty years, then a brief window of life again, on the other side of the planet, and then ice.”

“There’s beauty to it,” said Helge. She hadn’t turned to look at him.

“There is,” said Perry. “You have a choice of where to live, but I can’t say that any of the options are going to be like the life you left. I’ve heard some of what Jeff said about the world you left, but he’s not reliable, not in the slightest. I’d like to hear your account of it, if you’re willing.”

“What’s the point?” she asked, finally turning to face him. “You said there was a plague unleashed by some lunatic. Everyone is dead.”

“That’s what Jeff said,” replied Perry. “I don’t know that I trust him. I don’t think he was there until the very end.”

“Mmm,” she said.

Over the course of two years, Perry had started to take it for granted that everyone looked more or less like Brigitta. Everyone on Esperide descended from the same population of the space station, and they had come from a planet where humanity had only a single small island before exploding across the world in a process of breakneck industrialization and colonization — minus the slavery and exploitation, because there had been no other species. Everyone on Esperide was vaguely Nordic, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and there wasn’t all that much variation in their build or features either.

Helge was dark haired, and her skin was darker too, reminding him of someone of Italian descent, maybe. Her lips were a darker red, not the pink of Brigitta’s, and for a moment Perry had an odd feeling, like he was staring at an alien sort of human. It had been a long time since he’d seen someone outside of Esperide, excepting Jeff or what he saw in the few movies that had been stored on Marchand.

“They eat insects here,” said Helge.

“You get used to it,” said Perry. “They process pretty much everything, and … Jeff said that your people were vegan, but he never said whether it was for practical or moral reasons.”

“Both,” she replied. “We had magic that was capable of growing things.”

“I do want to test whether that works here,” said Perry. “It would change things completely if it could be learned by these people. They wouldn’t need to spread out so much, if they could induce their plants to grow.”

Helge watched him for a moment, then stepped closer, bare feet padding across the floor. “I will do whatever you ask me to,” she said.

“For now, you need to sit tight,” said Perry. “There’s an option to come with me to the next world, I think, but there’s some inevitable danger involved, if the place is inhospitable. I know this is a lot to take in, but from everything I’ve heard of the place you’re from … I know these people, and care for them, but they don’t have the comforts you’re used to, the services that you probably came to expect in the city.”

“I hate it here,” said Helge. She took another step closer. “You’re the only thing that I’ve found to praise.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Perry. He was growing uncomfortable. How much time over the past few years had he spent fending off women? Usually there was some attraction involved, an impulse that needed to be rationally dealt with, but here there was less of that. The women who had wanted him had been like Brigitta or Mette, strong and independent, very forward and without a lot of nonsense. He had always gone for that sort. Helge, if anything, reminded him of Xiyan, or the persona that Xiyan had put on. It wasn’t really anything that she had said, it was the way she moved, a faintly desperate seduction, as if sleeping with him was something to be done out of shy gratefulness.

“I should go,” said Perry. “You need your rest.”

“Oh,” she said. She stopped awkwardly where she was, another step taken toward him abandoned midway through. “You’re trying to find him, the monster?”

“I know where he’ll be,” said Perry. “I’ll be fighting him within the day. I had come here hoping that you would have some information on how to defeat him, whether it was something you had seen or something he’d let slip.”

“He said many things,” said Helge. “He claimed he could transform into a dragon, and that his flesh was as dense as stone. He could see into the past — could see my past.”

“Do you know how it worked?” asked Perry. “Did he talk about that? Because he’s talked to a lot of people around here, and I’ve recorded all those conversations, but there are certain things he’s kept close to his chest.”

“Once he’s laid eyes on you, he can see your entire past,” said Helge. “He said it’s like standing beside a person during every single moment of their life, even those they weren’t aware of, times they were blackout drunk or sleeping. He said that it’s the true past, not one warped by misremembering. He might have been lying about that.”

“He might have been lying about everything,” said Perry.

“When I was small, my father died,” said Helge. “It’s a sad story, but Jeff told me … he said that I abandoned my father to die in the cold.” She frowned. “Jeff said he went back to that moment, found it, watched my father’s heartbeat. I had thought my father was dead, that was why I left, it hadn’t been abandonment.”

“He could have been lying,” said Perry. “He probably was.”

“He doesn’t like lies,” said Helge. “He likes to tell the truth, even if what he says is meant to mislead. So I think he combed through my past and saw that moment, saw when I was seven years old, cold and hungry, and made the choice to leave my ailing father. I just don’t know if what he said about a heartbeat was right.”

“It’s possible,” said Perry. “I’m sorry.”

“I keep going back to it,” said Helge. She turned slightly away. “He must look for the boundaries, scanning through decades to see when conditions change. I went from a rundown house to an orphanage, it wouldn’t have been hard to spot. And he’s had practice, I suppose.”

Perry frowned slightly. “When was this?”

“I was seven, I said,” replied Helge.

“No,” said Perry. “I mean … well, yes, that first, how did you go from an orphanage to becoming a ballerina?”

“I was a charity case,” said Helge. “But also they wanted young women with very little to lose and everything to gain, women that they could mold and force to work long hours. If we weren’t on our toes, we were out on the streets.”

“Can I see?” asked Perry.

“A demonstration?” asked Helge. She narrowed her eyes at him. “You don’t believe me?”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” said Perry. “I just … wanted to make sure we’re talking about the same thing. It’s very specific, very cultural, what ballet means in my world, and it’s not something that I’ve ever seen in person, and I doubt we have much in the Gratbook.”

Helge put her hands together, then her feet together, took a breath, and extended her body, arms out to the side, tipping forward with one leg back, her entire weight on her toes in spite of the fact that she didn’t have those special ballerina shoes. She turned and twisted, always with perfect control, and Perry imagined that there were ballet terms for what she was doing. It could possibly have been a plié or fouette. It was beautiful, but also so precise and methodical that it felt like it was lacking in spirit.

“Impressive,” said Perry.

“Not really,” said Helge. She frowned at him, as though he was being too polite. “I’m malnourished and out of practice.”

“What I had meant to ask about the timeline,” said Perry, "was … up until the end, he’d have had his power locked onto the past of this woman, the other thresholder. And after he beat her, he came right here, and after he came here he seems to have locked the power onto me. So when would he have had a chance to lock onto you?”

Helge froze. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “I guess I didn’t think about it.”

“Mystery for another time,” said Perry. “Maybe he saw what he wanted from my past and then locked on you, or maybe he locked on you before he left. He saw you at the ballet?”

“Yes,” said Helge, letting out a breath. “It might have been then. He’s said that he uses it for recreation as much as for understanding his opponents. He told me that I would have been easy to seduce, if he had wanted to. But I think that was his plan anyway, even after chaining me up.”

“Is there anything else he said that you think can provide an edge?” asked Perry.

“He boasted a lot,” said Helge. “But I’ve told you what I know. He’s immune to poison and disease. He can turn into a dragon, long and white, a scaly beast. He can fly, if you haven’t seen that already. There’s the ring, which you’ve taken. His vision is supernaturally good, one of the benefits of his draconic form, capable of spotting an insect from a mile off. He can sense people, but not very well, a sort of … aura, I think he called it. Enough that he could see through a disguise, or tell if someone was trying to sneak up on him. But the dragon’s heart is the weak point.” She stared at Perry. “You’re going to kill him?” she asked.

“I’m going to try,” said Perry. “I’ll settle for him going through a portal and making sure he’s not a part of this world anymore.”

As he left the room, there was gratitude on her face, but as soon as he was gone, her face fell, returning to a quiet displeasure. She returned to the balcony and looked out at the farms and the wilderness beyond them. She extended a hand, raised slightly, feeling the vibrations in the air, then lowering it. Only then did a genuine smile appear.

Perry had watched all of it from the cameras placed around the room. The place was swarming with nanites too, a few of which had made their way onto her clothes during the brief interaction.

He wasn’t at all worried that she was going to jump to her death, but she was hiding something from him, something big. He no longer trusted her. Either she was a confederate of Jeff’s — but that made no sense, because she’d been chained up in there, and to chain her up with all those details, the wounds on her leg where she’d tried to remove the manacle, the clear lack of food … it would be too much of a stretch. That was too much planning for something that Jeff couldn’t have known would happen.

Perhaps she really had been a ballerina, in another life, but Perry doubted that was what she was now.

He had listened closely to what Jeff had said about the other worlds. There was really only one person this could be: Marjut, the opponent that Jeff had faced in the last world.

Putting the enemy thresholder in a private subspace was insane though, even if it was a defeated one, even if that manacle had been magical and did something to keep her contained. Tormenting someone that hated him, someone that he had beaten, would require a warped psychology and a cruel streak a mile wide.

In other words, it seemed very on-brand for Jeff, and as soon as Perry remembered who he was thinking about, everything seemed to click into place.

“March, I want you to keep an eye on her, something isn’t right here,” said Perry. “Either she’s not who she says she is or … I don’t know. There’s a possibility that she’s the woman Jeff talked about, the one who unleashed a plague. Talk to Esper, keep her under surveillance, let me know at the first whiff of magic — of visual, spatial, or logical error, I guess. Get Jeff talking about Marjut, her powers, her personality, her physical description, pull the logs on her, try to get a description that way, see if it matches. Don’t let him know that we have the ring, or the woman, whoever she is.” He let out a breath. “We can’t be fighting a war on two fronts. If they’re in cahoots …”

That wouldn’t make sense though. It wouldn’t be a war on two fronts, it would be two entirely different wars, which was perhaps even worse.

“Shall we give instructions to the crew of the Natrix?” asked Marchand.

Perry chewed his lip. “Shit, I guess … not. We could try to lock her in there, or I could try to kill her, but if she went toe-to-toe with Jeff, it feels like me trying to kill her with a single sudden strike would likely just escalate us to a battle. She’s got to be hiding all kinds of powers. What did he say about her? Flames, vines, control of … oh shit. Control of insects.” Perry stopped where he was. “Fuck.”

“Sir?” asked Marchand.

“New plan,” said Perry. “You do everything in your power to keep her content.” He took a deep breath. “You do everything in your power to keep her here. If she runs, we consider that proof she’s evil. Shoot her with the biggest guns we have, use Esper for it, send out drones, snipe her, whatever you can do, you do it.”

“Are you sure that it’s her, sir?” asked Marchand.

“No,” said Perry. “No, I’m not. But it would be exactly the sort of reckless, arrogant thing that Jeff would do. That fucking bastard. And if he learns that she’s here, that I took his ring and brought her out, then he’s going to use that to his advantage.” He clenched his armored fists so tightly that he threatened to break the armor. “We go up, we fight, we kill Jeff, we come down, we fight, we kill Marjut, unless this isn’t Marjut.”

“Very good, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry let out a long, slow breath. “And we have to hope that this problem, if it is a problem, will be a problem that we can let sit for a day or two.”